Let's start with this story from today's NYT. A company headquartered in the United Arab Emirates has been cleared to take a major role in operating the ports in and around New York City. The deal was cleared by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, a body whose members include Condi Rice, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Chertoff, Donald Rumsfeld, and others. Apparently they have no concerns about outsourcing protection of our ports to a nation that was directly implicated in funding 9/11.
These are the people that are supposed to be "strong on national defense?" Honestly, do you feel safer as a result of this decision? As ThinkProgress reports, the UAE has played key roles in supporting the Taliban, Iran's nuclear weapons program, and terrorism in general. So yes, of course, it is perfectly logical to let a company based there manage our ports.
And what about the whole "buy American" thing? I'm old enough to remember when buying products made in this country wass seen as patriotic. Shouldn't that same logic apply to the management of our national security infrastructure?
Next we get this story from today's WaPo: Glacier Melt Could Signal Faster Rise in Ocean Levels
Scary headline? You don't know the half of it:
| Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.
The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide. The scientists said they do not yet understand the precise mechanism causing glaciers to flow and melt more rapidly, but they said the changes in Greenland were unambiguous -- and accelerating: In 1996, the amount of water produced by melting ice in Greenland was about 90 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles in a year. Last year, the melted ice amounted to 225 times the volume of water that city uses annually. "We are witnessing enormous changes, and it will take some time before we understand how it happened, although it is clearly a result of warming around the glaciers," said Eric Rignot, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Greenland study is the latest of several in recent months that have found evidence that rising temperatures are affecting not only Earth's ice sheets but also such things as plant and animal habitats, coral reefs' health, hurricane severity, droughts, and globe-girdling currents that drive regional climates. The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are among the largest reservoirs of fresh water on Earth, and their fate is expected to be a major factor in determining how much the oceans will rise. Rignot and University of Kansas scientist Pannir Kanagaratnam, who published their findings yesterday in the journal Science, declined to guess how much the faster melting would raise sea levels but said current estimates of around 20 inches over the next century are probably too low. While sea-level increases of a few feet may not sound like very much, they could have profound consequences on flood-prone countries such as Bangladesh and trigger severe weather around the world. "The implications are global," said Julian Dowdeswell, a glacier expert at the University of Cambridge in England who reviewed the new paper for Science. "We are not talking about walking along the sea front on a nice summer day, we are talking of the worst storm settings, the biggest storm surges . . . you are upping the probability major storms will take place." |
What the hell is it going to take to wake people up? Are we going to wait until another major US city slowly floods and disappears? How muc more evidence do we need? This isn't something we can get wrong. It just doesn;t work that way. And given that there are very real and very legitimate national security reasons to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of enregy anyway, well... I simply don't understand what we're waiting for.
Remember, its not just that the Bush adminsitration is ignoring the issue. They're actually going out of their way to actively silence scientists from speaking out. And for its part in this mess, the American public seems totally apathetic. Even the destruction of a cultural treasure like New Orleans doesn't seem to have moved us to action.
But I'm a strong believer in the idea that leadership matters. The right people with the right vision can move mountains if they want to. And right now, the only mountains the people running this country seem to want moved are the ones made of cash.
I want my country back!
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